User talk:Mlm42/Archive 3

This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

Archive 1

Archive 2

Archive 3

Dynkin

I have edited the page Eugene Dynkin a bit, before realising that you may be in the middle of a revision. So a) I am sorry for disruption, b) please check that I have not done much damage (my edits were mainly cosmetic). Sasha (talk) 02:12, 10 March 2012 (UTC)

Great, thanks. I'm not in the middle of a revision, and your improvements all look good to me! :-) Mlm42 (talk) 02:23, 10 March 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for telling me about the edit. If I added this sentence, I must have had a reason - this was probably written in some article I was reading at the time. It's been awhile and I don't remember the source. On the other hand, a reference "Dynkin told me personally" is not a good reason either. Somebody (you?) might want to investigate this a bit. Mhym (talk) 02:36, 10 March 2012 (UTC)

I do not have access to the Freidlin article; the other anniversary articles do not mention the reason. "Dynkin told me personally" is not a good ref., but an unref-ed statement (esp. in a BLP article) is even worse :( Sasha (talk) 02:53, 10 March 2012 (UTC)

Talk:ROC

"Very heated discussion that wasn't going anywhere (and led to an IP block)"[1] I'm afraid that's a bit misleading and oversimplifying. It isn't the heated discussion that led to the block. It was because of HiLo48's mislocated comments. And it was HiLo48's intention to start a new section to complain.[2][3] Please don't refactor his comments. He complains vigorously. :) 202.189.98.134 (talk) 17:57, 11 March 2012 (UTC)

As far as I can tell, you are the same person as 202.189.98.131 (talk · contribs), who is currently blocked (so you are evading the block). I collapsed the discussion because it was pointless. Mlm42 (talk) 18:09, 11 March 2012 (UTC)

With all due respect, I have reduced the collapsed area so that the noteworthy part will be displayed. 202.189.98.132 (talk) 09:34, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

ROC canvassing

Hi Mlm42, just letting you know I've been investigating the canvassing issue for the past 2 hours. I posted some details in reply at Talk:Republic of China. – NULL ‹talk›
‹edits› 23:24, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

Teahouse

Hi Mlm42! Glad to see you lending a hand. As requested on the "Your hosts" page, it'd be wonderful to have people who are answering questions (hosts) participate in all areas that the hosts are asked to participate in per that host page. Two things I'd LOVE help with specifically: inviting people and when you are finished answering a question on the Teahouse page, it'd be awesome if you'd leave a Teahouse Talkback on the editors page. These are all necessities during (and honestly, beyond) the pilot phase of this project, and is very important in us tracking metrics to judge the projects successes, or failures. If this is going to be an issue, feel free to let me know! Thanks again for participating, you're doing an awesome job :) Sarah (talk) 21:30, 17 March 2012 (UTC)

Oops, I totally meant to leave that talkback template, but completely forgot. My bad - thanks for the reminder. :-) And sure, I'll try inviting some people as well. Mlm42 (talk) 00:16, 18 March 2012 (UTC)

You have been quoted

Here. I have hardly seen anything wittier here on WP. GotR ^Talk 02:52, 18 March 2012 (UTC)

:-) Mlm42 (talk) 03:21, 18 March 2012 (UTC)

There is a question at the Teahouse you might have interest in...

Dear Mlm42, I just asked a question at the Teahouse that you might have interest in! I hope you'll stop by and participate! Sarah (talk) 01:37, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

List of biggest box office bombs

This is your last warning. The next time you remove or blank page content or templates from Wikipedia, you may be blocked from editing without further notice. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Clicklander (talk • contribs) 17:00, 25 March 2012 (UTC)

FYI -

Hi - User:Clicklander has reported you at the vandal board - Wikipedia:Administrator_intervention_against_vandalism#User-reported - Youreallycan 18:23, 25 March 2012 (UTC)

Thanks; I think it's pretty clear this user was confused about what constitutes vandalism. Mlm42 (talk) 19:28, 25 March 2012 (UTC)

Thanks!

Thank you so much Mlm42 it means so much to me! Shashenka (talk) 12:59, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

Thanks

Mlm42, thanks for the barnstar! Now to see if my skills are up to using a talk page correctly. Hub Kid (talk) 14:43, 30 March 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the Barnstar

Will continue to do my best! :-) Omnis73 (talk) 19:42, 31 March 2012 (UTC)

Oops :-(

I am apparently not doing this in the right way (the moving part). Could you please help me? Marel Food Systems and Marel should either redirect to Marel hf. or Marel Food Systems and Marel hf. to Marel - both would be right. But Marel Food Systems - even though still used by many - is obsolete. I added some background information to the page. Omnis73 (talk) 20:50, 1 April 2012 (UTC)

Oh, I see. Sorry, that was my fault. Let me see.. Mlm42 (talk) 20:56, 1 April 2012 (UTC)

Okay, I've asked someone to fix this; for technical reasons we need an administrator to help out here. Yes, you should never copy and paste material into a Wikipedia page, for copyright reasons; the correct procedure is to "move" the page (see Wikipedia:Moving a page). So the page "Marel Food Systems" will shortly be moved to the page titled "Marel". Mlm42 (talk) 21:03, 1 April 2012 (UTC)

I think it's fixed now. Mlm42 (talk) 21:06, 1 April 2012 (UTC)

Perfect, thanks! Love it also how it keeps evolving (the OMX template you added). I'm looking forward to learning more. Omnis73 (talk) 07:34, 2 April 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the Barnstar

I never thought that I would end up editing Wikipedia, but here I am struggling with all the new things and just because of a painting. In my case a painting from Olle Nordmark. There is something in that painting that made me to want to know more about him, but unfortunately it's very difficult to find information about him. Worst of all the information is not accurate and the different sources might even contradict each other. I thought that I could try to make a summary of the different sources and build up something that is more complete and hopefully also closer to the truth, if there is something in this world that we can call truth. But how wrong was I, the deeper I get into the topic the more inaccuracies I find between the sources and the more things that need to be checked. So now I'm back to the drawing board and trying to gather more information. I put my hope in a compendium written in year 1974 in memorial for Nordmark. As amazing as it might sound I was able to find a person on the net owning that compendium and as I write it should be somewhere in the mail coming from Sweden :-) B1923 (talk) 22:09, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

That's a great story! Well I hope you decide to stick around Wikipedia; and maybe when the compendium arrives, you'll be able to let the world know what you have learned. :-) Mlm42 (talk) 22:15, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

The Tea Leaf - Issue Two

Hi! Welcome to the second edition of The Tea Leaf, the official newsletter of the Teahouse!

Teahouse celebrates one month of being open! This first month has drawn a lot of community interest to the Teahouse. Hosts & community members have been working with the project team to improve the project in many ways including creating scripts to make inviting easier, exploring mediation processes for troubling guests, and best practices regarding mentoring for new editors who visit the Teahouse.

First month metrics report an average of 30 new editors visiting the Teahouse each week. Approximately 30 new editors participate in the Teahouse each week, by way of asking questions and making guest profiles. An average of six new questions and four new profiles are made each day. We'd love to hear your ideas about how we can spread the word about the Teahouse to more new editors.
Teahouse has many regulars. Like any great teahouse, our Teahouse has a 61% return rate of guests, who come back to ask additional questions and to also help answer others' questions. Return guests cite the speedy response rate of hosts and the friendly, easy to understand responses by the hosts and other participants as the main reasons for coming back for another cup o' tea!
Early metrics on retention. It's still too early to draw conclusions about the Teahouse's impact on new editor retention, but, early data shows that 38% of new editors who participate at the Teahouse are still actively editing Wikipedia 2-4 weeks later, this is compared with 7% from a control group of uninvited new editors who showed similar first day editing activity. Additional metrics can be found on the Teahouse metrics page.
Nine new hosts welcomed to the Teahouse. Nine new hosts have been welcomed to the Teahouse during month one: Chicocvenancio, Cullen328, Hallows AG, Jeffwang, Mono, Tony1, Worm That Turned, Writ Keeper, and Nathan2055. Welcome to the Teahouse gang, folks!
Say hello to the new guests at the Teahouse. Take the time to welcome and get to know the latest guests at the Teahouse. Drop off some wikilove to these editors today, as being welcomed by experienced editors is a really nice way to make new editors feel welcome.

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Hi Mlm42,

How ? Penyulap ☏ 06:22, 4 May 2012 (UTC)

Umm.. I'm not sure I understand your question. There's an "E-mail this user" feature (on the left), which can be used by anyone. Mlm42 (talk) 06:51, 4 May 2012 (UTC)

Please fill out our brief Teahouse survey

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Hello fellow Wikipedian, the hardworking hosts and staff at WP:Teahouse would like your feedback!

We have created a brief survey intended to help us understand the experiences and impressions of veteran editors who have participated on the Teahouse. You are being selected to participate in our survey because you edited the Teahouse Questions or Guests pages some time during the last few months.

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The survey should take less than 15 minutes to complete. We really appreciate your feedback, and we look forward to your next vist to the Teahouse!

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The Tea Leaf - Issue Four

Hi! Welcome to the fourth issue of The Tea Leaf, the official newsletter for the Teahouse!

Teahouse pilot wraps up after 13 weeks After being piloted on English Wikipedia starting in February, the Teahouse wrapped up its pilot period on May 27, 2012. We expect this is just the beginning for the Teahouse and hope the project will continue to grow in the months to come!

Thank you and congratulations to all of the community members who participated - and continue to participate!

What you've all been waiting for: Teahouse Pilot Report is released! We look forward to your feedback on the methodology and outcomes of this pilot project.
....and if a pilot report wasn't enough, the Teahouse Pilot Metrics Report is out too! Dive into the numbers and survey results to learn about the impact the Teahouse has made on English Wikipedia.
Teahouse shows positive impact on new editor retention and engagement

409 new editors participated during the entire pilot period, with about 40 new editors participating in the Teahouse per week.
Two weeks after participating, 33% of Teahouse guests are still active on Wikipedia, as opposed to 11% of a similar control group.
New editors who participated in the Teahouse edit 10x the number of articles, make 7x more global edits, and 2x as much of their content survives on Wikipedia compared to the control group.

Women participate in the Teahouse 28% of Teahouse participants were women, up from 9% of editors on Wikipedia in general, good news for this project which aimed to have impact on the gender gap too - but still lots to be done here!
New opportunities await for the Teahouse in phase two as the Teahouse team and Wikipedia community examine ways to improve, scale, and sustain the project. Opportunities for future work include:

Automating or semi-automating systems such as invites, metrics and archiving
Experimenting with more ways for new editors to discover the Teahouse
Building out the social and peer-to-peer aspects further, including exploring ways to make answering questions easier, creating more ways for new editors to help each other and for all participants to acknowledge each other's efforts
Growing volunteer capacity, continuing to transfer Teahouse administration tasks to volunteers whenever possible, and looking for new ways to make maintenance and participation easier for everyone.

Want to know how you can lend a hand at the Teahouse? Become a host! Learn more about what makes the Teahouse different than other help spaces on Wikipedia and see how you can help new editors by visiting here.
Say hello to the new guests at the Teahouse. Take the time to welcome and get to know the latest guests at the Teahouse. Drop off some wikilove to these editors today, as being welcomed by experienced editors is really encouraging to new Wikipedians.

You are receiving The Tea Leaf after expressing interest or participating in the Teahouse! To remove yourself from receiving future newsletters, please remove your username here. Sarah (talk) 16:46, 13 June 2012 (UTC)

Hi Mlm42,..

I was wanting to ask you what you think of Mir Almaat 1 S1's comment here on User talk:Worm That Turned

Hi! You probably remember me, who rated you at your admin review. I've just come across here to ask that my old chap, Penyulap(aginst whom you opened a sock investigation) has been becoming disruptive in editing these days so is it wise to impose santions on him?
— Mir Almaat Ali Almaat ☏ From Trivandrum, Kerala, India(UTC+5:30) 11:22, 12 July 2012 (UTC), [4]

and this on the Wikiproject spaceflight page. in the section called "Penyulap"

Is it time for santions?
— Mir Almaat Ali Almaat ☏ From Trivandrum, Kerala, India(UTC+5:30) 08:07, 8 July 2012 (UTC), [5]

I'd like to know what you think about these comments. Penyulap ☏ 10:41, 16 Jul 2012 (UTC)

Hi Penyulap; it seems likely to me that Mir saw other people's comments at the Spaceflight WikiProject page about you, and consequently thinks you should be sanctioned.. but, I can't say for certain what he was thinking, of course. In any case I doubt sanctions are justified; I haven't seen evidence that would warrant a ban or a block.. but I haven't been following your activities very closely, nor do I have much experience with sanctioning other editors. Mlm42 (talk) 17:04, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

Hi Mark

Notifying you about an ANI thread about you puppeting, just in case you can run two or three keyboards at one time. Penyulap ☏ 21:13, 30 Jul 2012 (UTC)

Dude, do you actually think I'm the same person of Mir? Weird.. for a while I thought you were the same person are Mir! Ah, what a world. Anyway, I'm not Mir. Also, just to be clear, I was genuinely concerned that Mir was harassing you earlier.

I suppose the current ANI thread about you (which seems likely to end in an indefinite block) means you might not be able to respond here.. I think a Wiki-break (a real one) is exactly what you need anyway. All the best, Mlm42 (talk) 23:48, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

The Tea Leaf - Issue Five

Hi! Welcome to the fifth edition of The Tea Leaf, the official newsletter of the Teahouse!

Guest activity increased in July. Questions are up from an average of 36 per week in June to 43 per week in July, and guest profile creation has also increased. This is likely a result of the automatic invite experiments we started near the end of month, which seeks to lessen the burden on hosts and other volunteers who manually invite editors. During the last week of July, questions doubled in the Teahouse! (But don't let that deter you from inviting editors to the Teahouse, please, there are still lots of new editors who haven't found Teahouse yet.)
More Teahouse hosts than ever. We had 12 new hosts sign up to participate at the Teahouse! We now have 35 hosts volunteering at the Teahouse. Feel free to stop by and see them all here.
Phase two update: Host sprint. In August, the Teahouse team plans to improve the host experience by developing a simpler new-host creation process, a better way of surfacing active hosts, and a host lounge renovation. Take a look at the plan and weigh in here.
New Teahouse guest barnstar is awarded to first recipient: Charlie Inks. Using the Teahouse barnstar designed by Heatherawalls, hosts hajatvrc and Ryan Vesey created the new Teahouse Guest Barnstar. The first recipient is Charlie Inks, for her boldness in asking questions at the Teahouse. Check out the award in action here.
Teahouse was a hot topic at Wikimania! The Teahouse was a hot topic at Wikimania this past month, where editor retention and interface design was heavily discussed. Sarah and Jonathan presented the Teahouse during the Wikimedia Fellowships panel. Slides can be viewed here. A lunch was also held at Wikimania for Teahouse hosts.

As always, thanks for supporting the Teahouse project! Stop by and visit us today!

You are receiving The Tea Leaf after expressing interest or participating in the Teahouse! To remove yourself from receiving future newsletters, please remove your username here. Sarah (talk) 08:32, 4 August 2012 (UTC)

Barnstar

		The Original Barnstar
		This barnstar is awarded to everyone who - whatever their opinion - contributed to the discussion about Wikipedia and SOPA. Thank you for being a part of the discussion. Presented by the Wikimedia Foundation.

The Tea Leaf - Issue Six

Hi! Welcome to the sixth edition of The Tea Leaf, the official newsletter of the Teahouse!

Teahouse serves over 700 new editors in six months on Wikipedia! Since February 27, 741 new editors have participated at the Teahouse. The Q&A board and the guest intro pages are more active than ever.

A lovely little teahouse nestled in Germany from Wiki Loves Monuments

Automatic invites are doing the trick: 50% more new editors visiting each week. Ever since HostBot's automated invite trial phase began we've seen a boost in new editor participation. Automating a baseline set of invitations also allows Teahouse hosts to focus on serving hot cups of help to guests, instead of spending countless hours inviting.
Guests to the Teahouse continue to edit more & interact more with other community members than non-Teahouse guests according to six month metrics. Teahouse guests make more than twice the article edits and edit more talk pages than other new editors.
New host process implemented which encourages anyone to get started as a Teahouse host in a few easy steps. Stop by the hosts page and become a Teahouse host today!
Host lounge renovations nearing completion. Working closely with Teahouse hosts, we've made some major renovations to the Teahouse Host Lounge - the main hangout and resource space for hosts. Learn more about the improvements here.

As always, thanks for supporting the Teahouse project! Stop by and visit us today!

You are receiving The Tea Leaf after expressing interest or participating in the Teahouse! To remove yourself from receiving future newsletters, please remove your username here. EdwardsBot (talk) 00:09, 6 September 2012 (UTC)

Thank you Mark

Thank you. The merge that you suggested - List of Cuban writers and Cuban authors and writers - is appropriate. It's not my main concern at the moment though. The issue that requires - in my opinion - the most attention, is, as you mentioned, the WP:NLIST. Not only in Cuban authors and writers but in the List of Cuban writers as well. Take care. 7cc.19edv (talk) 10:13, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

W abbreviation

I appreciate anybody's suggestions to improve the List of rampage killers, and the W-column is certainly one of the things people are complaining most about, though I am not sure why it is such a big deal that 'Weapons' is not written out, since an explanation is given at the end of the list what all those cryptic letters actually mean. There don't seem to be any problems with the abbreviations in this list, for example, even though some of them aren't explained anywhere; somebody interested in American football might very well know what INT or Sck stands for, but a person like me can't even guess what it is supposed to mean (not that I'd be interested to know).
Anyway, back in the year 2008, when I created the List of rampage killers, I didn't even include any information about the weapons used, since I feared that it would clutter the list with unnecessary information (especially in cases where entire arsenals were utilized, e.g. Charles Whitman). But as it is quite helpful to be able to distinguish shootings from stabbings etc. I tried to find a way to include the info in a way that was as concise as possible, and the W-column was the result.
So, if we'd write out 'Weapons' I think that on the one hand the visual appearence of the tables would suffer quite a bit. At least I don't find it that appealing when single letters are floating in a lot of empty space, and as it is now, the column looks pretty tight and doesn't attract too much undue attention. On the other hand, if we can write 'weapons', why not also shotgun, knife, or Beretta 92FS? At least that would put the empty space into good use, at the loss of the columns concision, of course, and since this concision is the reason this column exists in the first place, giving it up seems counterintuitive to me. (Lord Gøn (talk) 23:25, 15 December 2012 (UTC))

Thanks for the reply; regarding the sports lists, it's not really a fair comparison, for a few reasons.. the main one being that the readers who are most likely to come to, and be interested in sports lists already know the standard abbreviations (although I think they should at least be explained somewhere on the page!). On articles like the rampage killings, you get flurries of activity (like right now) where people are coming to this list who have never seen a list like this before, and might not being able to guess what the column is even about. The first time I saw it, I passed over the "W" column as meaningless information. Then I wondered what weapons were being used, and thought "that's odd, they should have included the weapon in the list".. only then did I guess what the W column was.

Anyway, I think your suggestion about being even more specific about the weapon is a good one. Certainly the media are focusing on this issue of weapon quite a lot (even internationally). But you're right, it's hard to judge how much information to put.. My impression is that distinctions like "knife", "handgun", "automatic weapon" are common ones that the media uses, and also helpful.. specific makes of weapons aren't necessarily more helpful, since it might not be obvious to everyone what a "Beretta 92FS" is. If someone uses many weapons, maybe we could list two or three and then say "and others"; or just say "multiple guns and explosives", or something.

Regarding horizontal space, we could squeeze a bit more by using "Inj." instead of "Injured", since it's obvious enough what that would mean, and I think it would shrink the column.

Broadly speaking, I think the weapons column is important, and worthy of more space. When people want to know about mass killings, they want to know how many people were killed / injured, when, where, who, and how. The tables do a great job for all of these things, except the "how". For example, "F" covers such a wide range of possibilities, from a single pistol to three AK-47's. Conversations about gun laws are taking place right now, and people will be talking about regulating, or not, certain types of gun instead of others; and they may even be referencing articles like this during their arguments. That's why I think it's important to improve this column. What do you think? Mlm42 (talk) 08:49, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

Maybe I wasn't clear enough, but my point about a more detailed weapons-column wasn't really meant as a suggestion. What I wanted to say was that if you'd write out "Weapon" you could as well do the same with all the other letters since there'd be no point in keeping them, but then the column wouldn't be a small one anymore, which it was supposed to be, but a pretty large one. Quite a few of those entries that are now just one or two lines would balloon into something like the Starkweather/Fugate-entry here (Nr. 14 on the list). Yes, it may be mostly just a matter of taste, but I think that the list would then be a pretty unsteady sight and those entries which would remain one-liners thanks to a lack of information would look squeezed and sandwiched between those that are bigger. As it is now, pretty much all of those entries get almost the same amount of space and therefore can be treated as equals by our brain. Would some of them get more space I suspect that many of those one-liners would simply be skipped by people looking at the table, because they would subconsciously process them as something of minor importance.
Furthermore there are many cases where it is either not known at all what weapons were used, since it was only reported that the people were 'killed', therefore leading to an increased amount of blank space, or where the news remained so vague that you can only guess, since the only thing you can work with is that the victims were 'shot' or 'stabbed'.
What also speaks for keeping the current layout in my eyes is, that by sorting the W-column you have all cases where only firearms or melee weapons were used grouped together. Would we use more detailed descriptions they would be all over the place since handguns and rifles would be separated by, say, knives. Sure, this problem could be addressed, but with over 1200 entries fixing this would be a lot of work, and do you think anyody would volunteer to do it? Since I'm the only one really trying to keep the list up do date and consistent, I'm pretty sure in the end it would be me who would've to finish a job somebody else has started. It's the same with the flags that were added by someone to the country-column on the main-page. He simply stopped halfway through, and I had to fix the mess he had created. As it is now, it is still unfinished, since I am waiting for commenters to tell me if they are an improvement, because if they are not, I won't waste my time to add them to the rest of the lists, but would revert and return the page to a flag-free state. (As of now, there are no comments, so probably nobody would care if I removed them).
Also I am not a person who likes to sacrifice efficiency for simplicity, especially since it is not that difficult to memorize what those handful of abbreviations mean. With the single-letter approach a quick glance is enough to see what type of weapon was used; I don't think that would be possible if they were all written out.
Though I have to admit that at one point I played with the idea to make the weapons-column more detailed, in the same way I did with the "other weapons" (indicated by "O") which were split into arson, explosives etc. Then K would've been for knives, X for axes, H for handguns, R for rifles, and so on, but I dropped it, since I deemed it too complex to be used by people who are only casually dropping by to have a quick look, and it would create a great number of letter-combinations whereas now they are fairly limited.
One last thing. There is a reason why the tables look the way they do now. You see, when I started the list, I still used a 17" CRT-monitor and at the time I added the weapons-column the list already was filled to the limit, and to avoid that on my screen all those entries look like this:

4.	Doe, John Frederick, 27	Oct. 25/ 26	2018	Serpiente Roja de Floresta	Funnyland	3	11	Firearm Melee weapon Arson	Committed suicide or shot by police

the column had to be very small. And I'm still thinking that people with older computer equipment should be able to have a list that doesn't look like
a
row
of
disjointed
words. (Lord Gøn (talk) 18:29, 16 December 2012 (UTC))

Yes, I see where you're coming from, but there are other possible solutions to the width problem. I think the single letter abbreviations are a problem. I think at least having "Weap." as the heading is a start, because the reader at least then realizes that the symbols "F" and "M" mean weapons of some kind.

Other ideas to shrink the width is to merge columns - merging the two date columns, and the two place columns are the obvious ones. Both of these, but especially the location one, would save a significant amount of space. The date issue is being discussed elsewhere; merging the city and country, you could still make it so it sorts by country. Remember, the ability to sort is a handy feature, but not as important as readily available information.. currently information about the weapon is not apparent in the table. When you say "a quick glance is enough to see what type of weapon was used," I'd have to disagree.. because "F" or even "Firearm" isn't really very much information.. maybe it's a slingshot - who knows? So I think sacrificing sortability for clarity might be a good idea.

Anyway, quite a few of the entries are on multiple lines for me anyway, due to the names. If you think inconsistency is a problem, then you could always force at least two lines per entry, say by stacking the city on top of the country. Just a few ideas.. Mlm42 (talk) 21:20, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

So, you are proposing to go back to this? I see several problems with the layout I have dropped in about a week after creating the list. First, I like it to sort by date and year separately, but let's just assume we'd throw them together again, the result would look like this:

1994
Feb. 2, 1995
March 13, 1995
Oct. 26, 1995
April 1, 1996
April 19, 1996
Jan. 1997

As you can see the years are jumping left and right which makes it quite a bit more difficult to follow them, especially since the exact date of the killings is pretty often unknown. Compared to the table below I think it's definitely a step backwards.

	1994
Feb. 2	1995
March 13	1995
Oct. 26	1995
April 1	1996
April 19	1996
Jan.	1997

You could avoid that of course, by putting the years before the dates, like 1994-01-25, but that is not a way the general population writes a date; at least not where I come from. The same goes for the locations-column. Sorting by country would create an unworkable mess.

Steamboat "Africa"
Cairo, Egypt
Ras Burqa, Egypt
Kitale, Kenya
Marakwet District, Kenya
Kareeboomvloer, Namibia
Yemen
Bait al-Aqari, Yemen

There are cases where besides the country the exact location is not known, and more than once you'll find cases that were perpetrated on ships far from any land, so your eyes would constantly have to jump left and right, to see what country you are dealing with, and I don't see how anybody could prefer the table above, when you can have it this way:

Steamboat "Africa"
Cairo	Egypt
Ras Burqa	Egypt
Kitale	Kenya
Marakwet District	Kenya
Kareeboomvloer	Namibia
	Yemen
Bait al-Aqari	Yemen

To avoid that you'd have to put the country in front of the city, and even though this might be the norm in places like Japan, western countries normally don't do that.

About the slingshots, well, there are no cases listed where any slingshots were used. In pretty much all of those cases with an F guns were the weapon of choice, and I can think of only three entries where this is not (only) true, being once each, a flamethrawoer, a bow, and a grenade launcher (besides an assault rifle). Personally I think that detailed information about the weapons used belongs into an article about the killings, or the perpetrator, but not necessarily into a list. Also I remember a case where a woman simply threw a couple of kids down a well, killing six of them. Right now she has an MO in her weapons entry, but if you want to get more detailed what do you write? Hands? That wouldn't be the whole story. Hands and water then? Sounds weird to me. Fact is you won't get the point across what happened, if you don't go into a lot more detail, and the same is true for a few other cases where the methods of killing were rather unconventional. (Lord Gøn (talk) 23:06, 16 December 2012 (UTC))

Firstly, I think you could still sort by country using Template:Sortkey, if you wanted (i.e. {{sort|United States|Newtown, CT, United States}}). I see your points, so I've just scanned through a bunch of featured lists to see how they overcome these problems.. and I think the best way forward is to aim for a table more formatted like this: List of houses and associated buildings by John Douglas. If we had two or three lines per entry, then you could stack the name, date, and place, and the first three columns (name, date, place) would not take of very much horizontal space at all. Then you could spend the remainder by merging the "Additional notes" and "W" columns into a "Description" column, which would allow a sentence or two for description. Like this:

#	Perpetrator	Date	Location	Killed / Inj.	Description	Ref.
4.	Doe, John Frederick, 27	Oct. 25/26 2018	Serpiente Roja de Floresta, Funnyland	3 / 11	Use all this space for a descriptions. Two children killed by grenade launcher. Doe was later shot by police. This is a good description. Blah blah blah.	ref

One downside is this means you can't sort by "F" or "M", but it seems apparent that due to the importance of individual circumstances, this isn't much of a loss. That small loss would be far outweighed by an actually good description. "Threw six children down a well", or "Shot 20 first graders, 6 staff, his mother and himself." Just the headline, you know? Or, if desired, a little more detail. Forcing multiple lines per entry, frees up horizontal space to provide good descriptions. This seems to be a common technique among featured lists, so maybe it's something we should aim for. Mlm42 (talk) 10:03, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

I'm still of the opinion that your proposed solution looks somewhat muddled, but that aside, I think you seriously underestimate the amount of work it would take to add such detailed descriptions to even a fraction of the cases already listed. When starting the page I've had the intention to add short descriptions alongside the references of every entry, and I have tested it in some cases, as you can see here, but soon found it to be impractical, because it's already a pretty tedious task to add new cases with the limited information presented now.
So, it was not a very amusing thing to do when the number of cases was still fairly limited, and even adding that small W-column later on took me like forever, but to work yourselves through over 1000 cases with a total of several thousand references in many different languages in an attempt to gather enough information for something that is more than just a half-assed and semi-correct description - believe me, that's an almost insurmountable task, and you will have a hard time to find someone who not only pledges to do it, but is also willing to sacrifice dozens, probably hundreds of hours of his life to actually complete it.
And in all honesty, at least I am not willing to do this, since I certainly won't bother to type entire newspaper articles into Google Translate or piece together fragments of sentences from Google Books just to gather enough info for a small description. For an article, yes, but not for this. If you want to do it, I'd suggest you not only speak English, but also some Spanish, French, German, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, and Dutch, and it would certainly not be wrong if you'd have some knowledge in Korean, Portuguese, Greek, Swedish, Russian and probably several other languages, because that are the languages many of the used sources are written in, and being able to speak them would greatly decrease the time you'd have to waste to find what you are looking for. Over the years I have learned to handle some of these languages just enough to get the information I need, and Google Translate was helpful in most of the other cases (not all though), but for these descriptions you'd have to understand a little bit more than just "Man, pistol, shot ten, six dead, suicide". (Lord Gøn (talk) 18:49, 17 December 2012 (UTC))

Regarding the amount of work, one could start by simply putting in the "description" column (or maybe "information" is better) what is already there. "Firearm. Committed suicide." That's fine, to start. And it would be better than the current version, because then it provides the space for somebody else to add the information. A problem at the moment is that you can't really add descriptive information to the table, even if people have it. Mlm42 (talk) 08:42, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

Could be done, but in all probability nothing would be added to most of these description-boxes for the next one hundred years or so, because nobody would actually care enough to do so. Look at this list e.g. More than a year has passed since I reworked the list of animated feature-films, and I added all necessary information to pretty much all entries up to 1979 myself. I hoped that somebody else would either finish the rest of the job, or at least that casually somebody would drop by and fill out one or two every now and then, so it would steadily improve. After all, this would not be that much work, since many of those films have articles to get the necessary information from. And what has happened? Not a lot. Most of the little info present has been added by myself, and the blanks seem to bother no one but me. So, even though there is actually somebody maintaining the list, and User:Cattus does a good job in covering the more recent films, the old and fringe stuff is severly neglected. It would certainly be the same with the list of rampage killers; you get a lot of traffic and activity whenever there is an Utøya, Aurora or Sandy Hook, but who cares for a mass murder in Arkankergen, Yinshanpai or Siakago? Add the description-column, come back 10 years later and in all probability you'll find it in pretty much the same condition you left it. Looking at similar lists, the only chance for a different outcome would likely be that someone with an avid interest in mass murder passes by, and is really eager to do some serious work, but I suspect that I am the only one here on Wikipedia, maybe the entire planet who is systematically searching for such incidents, and why do I do so? To keep bias at a minimum. There are very few who are regularly editing this list, and even though I am very gratefuly for people like User:Millionsandbillions who are helping to keep it from devolving into utter chaos, the fact remains that I am doing most of the work to not only maintain, but also improve it. (Lord Gøn (talk) 16:58, 18 December 2012 (UTC))

And I, for one, am glad you do search for these incidents. :-) Various media outlets have put together their own lists, like Time's worst shootings in the past 50 years, but yes, these lists probably have biases towards the ones that get the most media coverage. Anyway, I think it's okay to have smaller, less notable incidents, without detailed descriptions. If nobody wants to come by and improve the entries (or if the information isn't available), that's fine. But I think some incidents, people will want more information about. And since many of the smaller incidents don't have their own Wikipedia page, these lists are really the only appropriate place to add the information, if somebody has it.

Should we try adding a wider "information" column with the school massacres list? (Considering the current levels of interest..) Mlm42 (talk) 09:46, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

M4 Carbine

I've added a reference to the bottom of the talk page. Fig (talk) 12:50, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

The Tea Leaf - Issue Seven

Hello again! We have some neat updates about the Teahouse:

We’ve added badges! Teahouse awards is a pilot project to learn how acknowledgement impacts engagement and retention in Teahouse and Wikipedia.

We’ve got a new WikiLove Badge script that makes giving badges quick and easy. You can add it here. You can give out badges to thank helpful hosts, welcome guests, acknowledge great questions and more.

Come join the experiment and let us know what you think!

You are receiving The Tea Leaf after expressing interest or participating in the Teahouse! To remove yourself from receiving future newsletters, please remove your username here

Thanks again! Ocaasi 02:23, 9 February 2013 (UTC)

The Tea Leaf - Issue Seven (special Birthday recap)

[[

File:TH_Badge_I+.png|thumb|140px|right|A celebratory cupcake from the Teahouse Birthday Badge]]

It's been a full year since the Teahouse opened, and as we're reflecting on what's been accomplished, we wanted to celebrate with you.

Teahouse guests and hosts are sharing their stories in a new blog post about the project.

1 year statistics for Teahouse visitors compared to invited non-visitors from the pilot:

Metric	Control group	Teahouse group	Contrast
Average retention (weeks with at least 1 edit)	5.02 weeks	8.57 weeks	1.7x retention
Average number of articles edited	58.7 articles	116.9 edits	2.0x articles edited
Average talk page edits	36.5 edits	85.6 edits	2.4x talk page edits
Average article space edits	129.6 edits	360.4 edits	2.8x article edits
Average total edits (all namespaces)	182.1 edits	532.4 edits	2.9x total edits

Over the past year almost 2000 questions have been asked and answered, 669 editors have introduced themselves, 1670 guests have been served, 867 experienced Wikipedians have participated in the project, and 137 have served as hosts. Read more project analysis in our CSCW 2013 paper

Last month January was our most active month so far! 78 profiles were created, 46 active hosts answered 263 questions, and 11 new hosts joined the project.

Come by the Teahouse to share a cup of tea and enjoy a Birthday Cupcake! Happy Birthday to the Teahouse and thank you for a year's worth of interest and support :-)

-- Ocaasi and the rest of the Teahouse Team 20:41, 27 February 2013 (UTC)

You are receiving The Tea Leaf after expressing interest or participating in the Teahouse! To add or remove yourself for receiving future newsletters, please update the list here

Editor of the Week

Yes. I nominated you and I was very happy to. I thought your interaction with the teacher was a superlative example of collaboration and it fit perfectly with the Editor Retention Theme at WP:WER. See this diff [6] and the discussion as to why we (User:Khazar2 and I) chose to rescind your nomination at that time. If you have returned to "active duty" I will gladly re-nominate you and worry about any criticism later. (Some of my fellow clerks at WER/Eddy are/were sticklers for following the rules) One other thing just for my information. How did you become aware that you had been nominated? The reason I ask is because we try to keep everything secret, from nomination to presentation weeks later, so that the recipient is surprised when they receive the Eddy. I hope you have returned. Wikipedia needs editors like you. ```Buster Seven Talk 14:20, 18 December 2013 (UTC)

Lieutenant of Melkor

I have filed an incident report against Lieutenant of Melkor. I invite you to come and comment completely at your option. Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents --Paisan1 (talk) 11:08, 21 June 2014 (UTC)

Merger discussion for Spaceworthiness

An article that you have been involved in editing, Spaceworthiness, has been proposed for merging with another article. If you are interested, please participate in the merger discussion. Thank you. JustinTime55 (talk) 16:30, 9 February 2015 (UTC)

Wikipedia:WikiProject Spaceflight: Retirement of project member WD Graham

Wikipedia:WikiProject Spaceflight: Retirement of project member WD Graham You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia:WikiProject Spaceflight#Retirement of project member WD Graham. WD Graham, formerly operating under the editor name of GW Simulations, has retired from Wikipedia. Please pop on over to offer a remembrance, or thanks, or ... (...maybe talk him in to giving it another go.) Thanks. N2e (talk) 06:23, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

ArbCom elections are now open!

Hi,
You appear to be eligible to vote in the current Arbitration Committee election. The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to enact binding solutions for disputes between editors, primarily related to serious behavioural issues that the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the ability to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail. If you wish to participate, you are welcome to review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. For the Election committee, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:54, 23 November 2015 (UTC)